Imaginings of Sand Read online

  3

  ONE DAY A man arrived in search of a bride. From the depths of the Great Karoo he came, driven by the need to perpetuate the family name. It was, of course, Bart Grobler. He was not very particular, as long as the prospective bride was of the female sex. Given his fixed purpose he might have done better by choosing a woman from more sturdy stock, who would make better breeding material; but most of the farmers in the outlying districts required sons-in-law to settle in the neighbourhood where they could help consolidate the godfearing civilised population; alternatively they expected a useful bride-price, which was about all a female child could provide in recompense for the unforgiveable lapse of not being a son. But Bart Grobler declined to do the former and couldn’t offer the latter – he was already settled on a farm of his own in the shadow of the Swartberge, the Black Mountains, where a wagon took seven weeks to negotiate the forbidding kloofs – and so his choice was limited.

  Hermina Hartman clung like lichen to her adopted child, the only creature, since her own overhasty elopement with the boer from the hinterland, on whom she could lavish her frustrated generosity of mind, refinement of spirit, and delusions of civilised behaviour; but David was rather eager to be rid of the disquieting presence he had in so ill-advised a manner brought into his own home. He somehow believed that she represented an ungodly influence, considering the environment from which he’d rescued her (for which, to be honest, she had never shown much gratitude). Hermina was confident that the little girl had come to them intact, having satisfied herself through frank examination, within the first few days of her arrival, that Lottie had not been ‘interfered with’ by her rude captors; but it seems that, perhaps feeling guilty at having initially entertained the same suspicion, she derived some perverse satisfaction from never communicating her finding to her husband.

  All in all, what to Hermina was an irrecoverable loss (one can’t be sure, but rumour has it that she died within the year, of grief), to David Hartman seemed deliverance. Some hurried, secret transaction was concluded between the men, and before Hermina had an inkling of how far the arrangements had already proceeded, Lottie was carried off into the deepest interior on the wagon of her latest, surly, saviour. By the time they reached his farm below the Swartberge she was already pregnant; and it is doubtful whether her pregnancies through the following years ever allowed them the leisure of travelling to a drostdy to enter into legal marriage.

  The rest you know. In ones and twos and threes, even that famous foursome, Lottie brought into the world her eighteen children all named Samuel. She seemed to form no attachment, ever, to any of them, except possibly the first girl, the long-haired one. It is arguable whether she ever really knew, or cared, what was happening to her body or why it was so regularly put to such curious and uncomfortable use. In the succession of pregnancies and births she lost her looks, her figure sagged, she grew bulbous and unwieldy as if dragged down by the heaviness of the earth. Even then she cast no shadow.

  As her brood grew more and more numerous, the house more noisy and unruly, she became more lonely. Apart from, sometimes, the wise oldest child Samuel, there was no one she could confide in. In her desperation she spoke to whatever she came across, a mouse in the kitchen, a spider in the yard, birds in the trees, stones, brittle grasses. But in the end she stopped speaking altogether, even to herself Her only remaining language lay in the signs she entered on the silent world.

  When she could, she continued to retreat into the veld, that semi-desert of barren undulating breast-shaped hills and outcrops interspersed with wide tracts of flatland bearing encrusted in its rocks the remains of antedeluvian seas – shells and ammonites, crustaceans, backbones as delicate as the outline of ferns, the later bones of dinosaurs and the shapes of plant or animal life. Leaving her motley brood – some white, some off-white, some unambiguously brown, but all blessed by the redeeming name of Samuel – to the care of her equally strange, absent-minded eldest daughter, Lottie continued inscribing on the landscape her indecipherable scrawls, her birdlike, reptilian or insect tracks, sending her futile messages to that shadow which remained forever lost, and which she missed as she missed the distant past.

  Until, in the end, barely thirty years old but worn out before her time and recognising in her bones the intimations of death (that much she confided to the girl Samuel before she left), one day she did not come back. All that could be recovered of her were the inscriptions she had left on bark and sand and stone; her own tracks no one could follow, they were invisible, as if her body, hulking as it was, had had no weight of its own, not even the weight of a shadow on the land.

  4

  THAT WAS LAST night. Short as the story was it took hours to tell, and Ouma was exhausted when she finished. I am concerned about her; it weighs heavily on me. Yet the nurse has told me this morning that Ouma seems ‘more chirpy’; and even the doctor appeared more satisfied with her condition than before.

  Trui has been hassling me since I sat down to breakfast. ‘When are we going to vote, Kristien?’ Ever since she’s agreed to call me by my name she has slid into a role of maternal authority which both amuses me and makes me feel wary; I’ve never taken kindly to management and control. Ouma has been the only exception.

  ‘They said on the radio the queues are very long,’ I told her, quite honestly. ‘Let’s give them some time to drain off the rush.’

  The way she rattled and banged the dishes as she put them away was comment enough.

  Shortly afterwards Jeremiah appeared in the door. He had put on his Sunday best, a shiny black suit with leather patches on the elbows. ‘I have washed the car,’ he announced solemnly. ‘We can go any time.’

  ‘Kristien says to wait,’ Trui replied, casting me a look of silent reproach.

  Then it was Jonnie. He must have bought a whole new outfit for the occasion: windbreaker, baggy pants, red shirt, floral tie; his head gleamed with Brylcreem. ‘Right, right, right,’ he said, rubbing his hands. ‘Today we’re giving those boytjies in town a lesson in democracy. We’re all ready.’ And behind him in the yard I saw a small crowd of labourers, all decked up for the occasion, men with hats worn at angles that ranged from rakish to downright reckless, women with elaborate floral decorations on their heads, and carrying babes in arms.

  ‘Kristien says to wait,’ repeated Trui in announcement to the world in general.

  I could feel my resistance caving in. Yesterday, when Sam Ndzuta had telephoned again to sound me out, I’d succumbed; I now had the necessary documents. But I was still not committed to voting; it was just a precaution.

  Then came Jacob Bonthuys, appearing unannounced from the dark hole he’d turned into his home. He had no change of clothing; but he’d obviously gone to great lengths in the bathroom upstairs to make himself as fragrant as possible; and even his crumpled clothes had a new devil-may-care look about them.

  ‘I thought about it all night, Miss,’ he said, his earlier apologetic attitude replaced by a new buoyancy, ‘and I just can’t miss a day like this. I feel a bit like Loeloeraai. It is a strange planet. But I think if I go with you it will be all right.’

  ‘Who is this?’ asked Jonnie, his eyes narrow with suspicion.

  ‘A visitor,’ I said quickly, and then shoved away the silver I was polishing. ‘All right, we can go now. I’ll just make sure Ouma is all right.’

  She was. And now we’re on our way to town. How we all fit into the hearse – there must be at least twenty of us – can only be explained by an adept of Chinese puzzles; yet no one complains. On the contrary, this vehicle could never in its long exemplary life have transported a more exuberant load. Jeremiah having assumed his rightful place behind the wheel, we progress at a more dignified speed than the last few times I drove; even so we pass many other vehicles on the road, most of them donkey carts and horse-drawn buggies; one rickshaw-like contraption, a sight I have never seen before, is even drawn by ostriches and greeted with a huge explosion of shouting and encouragement from my pas
sengers. There are several groups of people on foot too; from their looks some of them may have been walking through the night. Twice Jeremiah stops to invite pedestrians aboard, but after that – even if it makes me feel a heel – I persuade him that we cannot possibly accommodate more bodies. Even Stephen Hawking would have problems here.

  I’ve never seen the town like this before. Within a radius of a kilometre or more around the city hall there is no room at all to park; even the sidewalks are jam-packed with cars. Yet when I propose to Jeremiah that we drop off the passengers at the hall before setting out to find a spot for the car, it is turned down vociferously.

  ‘We’re in this together,’ says Trui emphatically, and it is endorsed with a cheer.

  Fully half an hour later – a quarter to twelve by the clock on the church tower which arrogantly surveys the whole town from its divine height – we join the end of the queue. My expectations of a diminished crowd evaporate: the queue, four or five deep, stretches the length of almost three blocks. The mood is festive, even if the first news imparted to us, almost gleefully, is that the polling station has run out of voting papers. Not that there seems to be anything extraordinary about it, as several ghetto-blasters in the queue proclaim in running commentary that all over the country there is chaos at the polls. Some stations have received no material at all, at others the electoral officers haven’t pitched up, still others have run out of ballot papers, boxes, or the magic invisible ink with which our hands are to be marked to distinguish the already-voted from the still-to-vote.

  I can imagine the indignation this would cause among the placid British; but here there is no sign of anger or protest. It is not even a matter of resigning oneself to the inevitable: the crowd is in high spirits, irrepressible, exuberant. What difference does a hitch here or there make? Who minds waiting another hour, or two, or three, if one has already waited a lifetime? I, too, find the excitement contagious. I’ve never voted before. From the one election in which I could have voted after my eighteenth birthday I abstained to demonstrate my rebellion against the system that to me represented Father and his band of brothers, the men in suits, the men with the paunches, the men with the balding heads and the hairy nostrils and the signet rings and the old-boy ties and the Hush Puppies. In England I never bothered to vote, even when I could; I remained an outsider, I could never take its social issues seriously. Now, suddenly, it has become an adventure. What for individuals in the West is a small formality, something so obvious as not to require a second thought, has here become a momentous undertaking. For me – and even more so for most of those around me in the boisterous queue – this is the first opportunity ever of making my little cross for something I believe in. Perhaps I am finally to be vindicated for the vehemence with which I once responded to my faraway disparaging lover, ‘I am a believer, only I haven’t found something to believe in yet.’ I feel giddy as the thoughts, so many of them, tumble through my mind: these past two weeks, the years stretching behind them, the time of my life, the long chain from Ouma’s reminiscences that reaches back into the shadows, to the first woman who emerged from the waters driving her cow before her and carrying her baby on her back. Yes, I think (I write, now): yes: this is what I wish to believe in. Not merely a new political system, not democracy, not ideology, nothing as tenuous as ‘victory’ or ‘freedom’, all the great easy slogans that blacken so rapidly, like photographic paper once it has been exposed to light. No, not those abstractions: but these people around me, here, now, today; and those women behind me, all of us in search of our lost shadows. The shadow isn’t there, ahead of us, in that unimaginative box in which we’ll thrust our folded multicoloured papers: yet without the box we cannot reach it.

  Each of the many people around me on this dazzling day, so unnaturally hot for late April, has brought a whole history along: thousands of histories are gathered in this queue, most of them, I’m sure, more fascinating than my own – with more discoveries, more joys, certainly more suffering, perhaps more spectacle than mine – but this is what moves me, here where I am standing in the spot where I have now been for the past hour, this simple and awesome discovery that I have my own history. It may be paltry; or it may be outrageous; most of it may even be invented. But it is mine. And all of it, the whole accumulated wave of it, will be involved in the small cross I am to trace.

  They, too, must be sensing it. Relegated to the sidelines, silenced, scoffed at, ignored or degraded, today each one will mark the paper, and each mark will be equivalent to any other. I’ve waited for thirty-three years. There are others around me who must have been waiting for sixty, seventy, eighty. The country has waited for centuries. Is it any wonder then that a few more hours seem like nothing?

  Another hour. There are enterprising individuals around, most of them young, moving up and down the queue with tins of Coke and trays of food for sale: hot dogs, samosas, boerewors, ostrich biltong, bananas. Those who have money buy, unasked, for those who don’t. We all share. We all talk, and laugh, and speculate together. In our midst are businessmen in suits, labourers in overalls, youngsters in jeans, the destitute in rags, the social climbers in outfits from Cape Town and Johannesburg, or from Shapiro’s. All colours, all ages, all shapes and sizes. An old woman leans against the shoulder of a young man she has never seen before. I hold for some time the dribbling baby of a young mother who looks worn out; it pees on my hip, but somehow it doesn’t bother me. A young woman turns her back to brace that of a white-haired old man whose hand is shaking on his stick.

  I survey my own little crowd. Trui in red pill-box hat with veil, and a purple cardigan that must be intolerable in the heat, and pleated skirt; Jeremiah as black and solemn as any undertaker; Jacob Bonthuys, arm in sling, standing very straight; Jonnie swaggering up and down the line, chatting up girls; the farm labourers and their families, the people we picked up on the road while we still had room. We take turns to wander off, to stretch our legs and ease our backs in motion. Much further to the front I find the mayor and his wife; they seem to have no qualms today about waiting with a group of municipal workers in orange overalls. They greet me like old friends. There is the dominee, now smiling by the grace of God as if he’s just received authority to forgive me all my sins. The Shapiro sisters, eager and twittering. The chemist, the women from the Home Industries, the tellers from the bank, each white face framed in a wreath of browns and blacks.

  Abel Joubert is there too, with his wife Winnie. She looks more tense than the last time I saw her; beside his tanned, eager, active face hers looks much older, as if she were his mother or his aunt.

  ‘I didn’t expect to find you here so late,’ I say. ‘I thought you’d have been among the first to vote.’

  ‘Oh, I deposited my first load at six this morning,’ he says, his face creasing in a smile.

  ‘Load?’

  ‘There are so many people living on my farm –’

  ‘Squatting,’ reminds his wife, with the merest suggestion of reproach.

  ‘Well, they have nowhere else to go,’ he brushes her aside. ‘And the farm is big enough, so I’ve invited them to stay until some more permanent arrangement can be made. But it means I’ve had to bring in four truckloads of people who wanted to vote. Just as well I had some help, otherwise I’d still have been on the road.’

  ‘Who was the helper?’

  ‘You can ask that again. Could have knocked me over with a feather. Dirk Otto, one of Casper’s lieutenants.’

  ‘Covering his back,’ I say.

  ‘Sure. And it’s mixed with a lot of old-fashioned hypocrisy. But the main thing is that he turned up. As if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. If you ask me, it’s catching.’

  ‘If optimism was a disease Abel would have been in intensive care by now,’ says his wife. Below the good-natured pleasantry there is an edge of stress; I can imagine how much she has been going through. Yet Abel, for all his generosity of mind, seems unaware of it. Unless he thinks it’s unimportant, a
woman’s quirkiness, to be dealt with later, not now.

  ‘Can you blame me?’ he asks. ‘Just look at this’ – pointing at the crowd – ‘this is as much a miracle as the multiplying of the loaves and the fishes, don’t you think? All those prophets of doom – all those people who hoarded up supplies expecting the apocalypse …’ A broad smile as he puts his arm round his wife. ‘For the next year there’s going to be a heavy cloud of farting hanging over the district. All those tins of baked beans. Let’s hope it’s good for the crops.’

  There is merriment all round.

  When it subsides, I take Abel by the arm. ‘There is someone I’d like you to meet,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ he tells his wife. She nods, resigned. I accompany him back to my place in the queue.

  From a distance he recognises Jacob Bonthuys and stops in disbelief.

  ‘I thought he was – I had no idea of what happened to him!’

  ‘He’s been on a trip with Langenhoven,’ I tell Abel.

  It is good to see them embrace.

  Then I leave them to resume my leisurely inspection of the long queue ahead. The old, the young, the decrepit, the blooming. Everybody is ready to strike up a conversation, crack a joke, offer a sweet, a piece of biltong, a swipe from a lukewarm can of Coke, I hesitate briefly when I recognise Anna and Casper, but they’ve already spotted me and I cannot escape. Lenie is with them, from sheer curiosity, I imagine; although at the rate we’re moving she may be old enough to vote by the time we reach the booths. She smiles up at me, her small triangular face frank and untroubled. She winks. She’s wearing the bra. Casper and Anna are the only ones in the line whose faces look strained to me, but it may be only because I can see through them. He mumbles something and moves off; his buddies must be elsewhere.